One Ring to rule them… oh, wait.

Plato spent a lot of time, in The Republic, in discussions about Kallipolis, in specific, and politics, in general. However, we have to remember that he did so as a means to discuss the nature of justice and virtue, whether such concepts had objective definitions, and whether it benefitted human beings to adhere to those concepts, once he’d managed to discover those definitions.

In the dialogue, Socrates’ old foe, Thrasymachus, stuck to his guns and argued that the term, “virtue” had arbitrary definitions that varied tremendously from place to place, and that “justice” existed only as a localized set of rules that gave the weak artificial protections from the strong, in violation of natural law. Socrates, on the other hand, pointed out flaws in the arguments of Thrasymachus and, in the characteristic manner of the dialogues, did not present an argument, himself, but asked for suggestions from other members of the group.

In The Republic, Plato had the character Glaucon (based on one of his older brothers) offer up a thought experiment based on a Greek fable. According to the fable, the Lydian shepherd, Gyges, endured an earthquake and, upon investigating the damage to his pastures found an old burial chamber with a skeleton, inside. The skeleton bore a ring with a jewel, on it, and nothing else. A poor shepherd and not one to pass up an opportunity, Gyges took the ring and slid it on his own finger, and then went back to his flock.

A while later, as Gyges attended an assembly of all the shepherds in the region, he got bored and started to fiddle with the ring. He turned it around so the jewel lay in the direction of his palm, and promptly became invisible. More than that, the ring seemed to have enchanted those sitting next to him so they remembered that he’d left the assembly. When he turned the ring back around, again, not only did he reappear, but his adjacent neighbors remembered him returning to the assembly.

So, the ring not only made him invisible, it also seemed accompanied by an enchantment that provided possible witnesses to his disappearance with a rational explanation for the fact they could no longer see him. That meant the ring didn’t just gave him the power to turn invisible, it also made it nearly impossible to even suspect him of wrongdoing, no matter what he did while invisible.

The ring made Gyges almost completely unaccountable for any actions he ever took.

Under those circumstances, Glaucon said, give the ring to a virtuous man, and then to an immoral man, and then examine how each man would behave.

Glaucon argued that while the virtuous man might hold out against temptation a bit longer, in the end no one possessed such iron will as to avoid misuse of the ring. As such, in the end, both men would behave in exactly the same way, and that means “justice” is nothing more than an arbitrary set of external rules imposed by the larger society.

In the dialogue, Socrates disagreed, and asked the group to leave aside for a moment the impact of the behavior on other people, and instead look at its effects on the ring-bearer, himself. By its very definition, Socrates argued, unjust actions create injustice, while just actions create justice. Moreover, Plato had Socrates argue, injustice not only destroys the harmony of a society, it also pollutes the mind (or soul) of the person who perpetrates it.

Given the power to act with impunity, Plato wrote, the wise man would use the power of the ring to further the cause of justice, because that would not only help the society in which his own enlightened self-interest lay, but also strengthen his own mind and spirit. On the other hand, he said, to use the power to misbehave not only damages the larger community upon which everyone depends (and thus, indirectly, causes harm to one’s own self-interest), it also damages the mind and spirit of the perpetrator.

Look at most criminals, Plato noted, and note how much they have in common with most tyrants. In each case, both criminals and tyrants are enslaved to their own appetites and, of the two, tyrants cause far more harm to others than any petty thief. That’s because power not only magnifies the harm tyrants can do to others, but it also multiplies the harm tyrants do to themselves.

The Ring of Gyges is, pretty much, the ultimate power, Plato wrote, and as such, misuse of it would result in tremendous harm to the mind and soul of the perpetrator – so much so, that he would ultimately destroy himself, in pretty short order. Since misuse of power seems to result in inevitable destruction (usually, self-destruction), sooner or later, Plato had Socrates argue, that means justice and virtue must reflect some sort of natural universal order.

For my part, I don’t really buy the notion that our sense of justice and definitions of virtue reflect any sort of external phenomenon. It seems to me that our ideas of justice and virtue more likely depend on the structure of the human mind, and realities of human existence, than they do on some sort of external pure Form that our minds tap into, in some way.

As such, I think it behooves us to look more toward psychology, neurology and evolutionary biology to figure out the origins of those ideas, and the social sciences (political sciences, history, sociology, anthropology) to better understand how those notions manifest in our attempts to create or alter human societies. I think our definitions of virtue and justice have a lot more to do with how human beings think, than they do with some sort of objective universal structure.

Moreover, while the human experience is shaped and filtered by external conditions, human psychology and human needs don’t really vary by all that much. As Abraham Maslow wrote in 1943, we all need to eat, to sleep, to drink, to feel secure, to receive emotional validation and to feel our lives have some significance. How we get those things may vary, from person to person and from place to place, but our need for them seems pretty universal.

That means it may be possible to someday create laws, ethical values and social norms that work really well for everybody, and most humans would consider such workable developments both just and virtuous.

All that said, the Ring of Gyges stands as an interesting story, in and of itself, and Plato’s use of it makes it into one of the most utterly useful metaphors in all of philosophy.

The ring is a metaphor for any asset that allows human beings to escape accountability for their actions. Wealth is “Ring of Gyges,” as is celebrity, but the most powerful “ring” of all is, of course, political power.

Plato’s observations of the self-destructive nature of those who misuse wealth, misuse power, or hide behind celebrity remain both astute and insightful, even in modern times. Open up any newspaper or watch any news program (more about those, later…), and one can see any number of examples of how a sense of impunity results in the collapse of the lives, minds and fortunes of the wealthy and powerful.

As a mythological metaphor, the Ring of Gyges remains relevant in modern society, as anyone who has watched Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies can attest. While the original author, J.R.R. Tolkien, primarily drew from the Germanic myths of the ring-givers for the Lord of the Rings, the One Ring was at least partly influenced by The Republic. The use of a gold ring to symbolize power and corruption goes back a long, long way.

Gold may not be the root of all evil, but the greed for it certainly is, and while power may not absolutely corrupt everyone, all the time, the trend is clear enough that the need for safeguards against abuse is directly proportional to the power exercised. It is almost certainly true that, should anyone stumble across a Ring of Gyges, the best thing to do is toss it into the nearest volcano.

Links:

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html

http://plato-dialogues.org/tetra_4/republic/gyges.htm

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl201/modules/Philosophers/Plato/plato_dialogue_the_ring_of_gyges.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20100211014419/http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/maslow.htm